MORAIN: 'PASSION' IS ONE OF DE PALMA'S FINEST"NO REALISM, BUT FORMALISM AT ALL COSTS; FILMED WITH GREAT PRECISION & MASTERY"

Les Inrockuptibles critic Jean-Baptiste Morain has just posted a review of Brian De Palma's Passion, which opens in France on February 13. Morain calls it one of De Palma's finest films. Below is a Google-aided translation of the review:

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"Funny idea on paper: the new De Palma is adapted from the last film directed by Alain Corneau, Love Crime, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, a game of manipulation that goes wrong between employees of the same company. What was the interest in this rather easy-going French thriller? He draws from it a film in his own way, the one that we prefer, a mixture of Hitchcock and Lang, erotic and morbid fever in an atmosphere where the baroque and fantastical reality and imagination are blurred constantly, where the characters are manipulated, to humiliate each other without really knowing who prevails over the other.

"No realism in Passion, but formalism at all costs. No plausibility either, but suspense, pitfalls, daydreams or nightmares that seem to fit into each other. Passion is also a film of women, mostly bisexual, a film where the one man band will leave pale and deceived like a rookie. Who is nice: blonde, brunette or redhead? Mystery. And if they were one? The twists succeed more twists in a game of mirrors where revenge leads the dance. Passion is nearly a genre film. De Palma returns to his 70s Hitchcockian vein, a period when he amused himself by making variations on the themes of the old master, to draw his own cinema, both haunted by the model and its ability to give life and day to a very personal film.

"De Palma said one day, in a bonus DVD: 'Hitchcock, I know very well of what he speaks.' Another way of saying acquaintances between fantasy filmmakers of Catholic formation, where sex is at the same time a horrific vision and completely exciting. Filmed with great precision, uncluttered, with a knife, with a mastery of every second, Passion is undoubtedly one of the finest films of Brian De Palma."